This Marx Brothers' musical comedy has one of the most
celebrated scenes in all screen comedy - the classic, slapstick crowded
stateroom scene. Seedy entrepreneur and swindler Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho
Marx) sails to New York on the S. S. Americus with the New York
Opera Company to represent his interests toward wealthy dowager Mrs. Claypool
(Margaret Dumont). On board, Driftwood finds himself in Suite # 58, a
telephone-booth-size stateroom on the cruise ship.

When the steward attempts
to cram a steamer trunk into the cozy room, Driftwood asks: "Wouldn't
it be simpler if you just put the stateroom in the trunk?" He is aghast
to see three stowaways, Fiorello (Chico), Riccardo (Allan Jones), and
a sleeping Tomasso (Harpo) curled up in the bottom drawer of the trunk
- they pop out into his tiny compartment. To keep them quiet, he steps
into the hallway and places an order with the steward for meals - supplemented
by additional orders for food items from behind the stateroom door.

A
persistent procession of people from the ship's staff parade into the
tiny shoebox cabin no bigger than a closet: two chambermaids to make
up the room, an engineer to turn off the heat, a manicurist to trim
Driftwood's nails, the engineer's large assistant, an inquiring young
woman wandering around for her Aunt Minnie and asking to use the phone,
a determined, gum-chewing, cleaning washwoman to mop up, and the stewards
with the meal order.

Each of the occupants that are entangled together
must find space in a nook or cranny of the miniscule stateroom. The
grande dame, Mrs. Claypool shows up in her finest costume and opens
the door, letting loose the above-mentioned in an avalanching torrent
of bodies into the corridor.

[The other classic scene in the film is "The Party of the First Part"
contract scene and the line about a "Sanity Clause".]

The dancing partnership of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire,
stretching over seven years for RKO Studios, has produced a priceless
number of memorable dance duets. Most film afficionados consider it
(their fourth film) to be their finest film together.

In a centerpiece
solo, Astaire dances the sensational Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails number
as part of the second act of his London show - it is the quintessential
tuxedo-clad dance, backed by a top-hatted, tuxedoed, male chorus line.

Together, the duo performs the romantic adagio Cheek to Cheek.
He breaks into song in mid-sentence: "Heaven, I'm in Heaven. And my heart
beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek.
When we're out together dancing, Cheek to Cheek..." First, they dance
in the company of others on a crowded dance floor and then dance/drift
across a bridge to a deserted, circular ballroom area. All alone in a
dreamlike setting, they perform a romantic dance together.

Dale's ankle-length
gown, (the most famous of all Rogers' dance dresses), light, ice-blue
satin covered with ostrich feathers, sheds as they whirl around. Beautifully,
they stretch out an arm to each other (his left, her right), leading
to her twirling spin into him. Briefly, they repeat their earlier tap-dancing
routine from the bandstand, performing side by side. Several times
she bends deeply backwards in his arms during their choreographed dance,
surrending to his seductive, luring attraction. Mixed with standard
ballroom dance positions, they also leap and turn boldly, separate,
spin, and then return
"cheek to cheek."

After a climactic ending with a full orchestral burst,
the dance ends as they come to rest against a wall. They affectionately
gaze at each other, while Jerry slowly twiddles his thumbs.

The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) has a disastrous, nightmarish
lunch at a food-eating machine (another most-memorable sequence) -
a mechanical, automated, aerodynamically-styled, silent feeding machine
which features a revolving table, an automaton soup plate, an automatic
food pusher, a revolving low and high gear corncob feeder, and a hydro-compressed
sterilized mouth wipe.

Back at his factory worker job in the late afternoon
after rejoining his co-workers on the assembly line, his job is to
tighten bolts on an endless series of machine parts - he is a small
cog in the factory. The key to successful nut-tightening is to perform
his movements and tasks with clocklike tempo and precision. From his
work station on the assembly-line, he holds wrenches in both hands
to tighten nuts on a long stream of steel plates carried on the conveyor
belt production line. The boss has ordered production increases:
"Section 5 - give 'em the limit," so the conveyor belt is sped
up - a hilarious, frenzied scene as he makes an heroic effort to keep
up.

Under the strain of the job, he finally goes beserk,
slowly driven insane by the assembly line. He literally lies prone
on the belt and is dragged, swallowed and eaten up by the whizzing
wheels, gears, and cogs of the monstrous machine. His body snakes its
way through the gears until the production line's direction is reversed
and he finally emerges free - coughed out of the machine. He has gone
completely crazy and insane.

[The
film's final image of the Tramp walking into the sunrise is indelible.]

There are few romantic tragedies that capture the funereal
death scene as well as this exquisite film.

The 19th century Parisian
courtesan, Marguerite 'Camille' Gautier (Greta Garbo), a notorious, kept-woman
with an avaricious life of self-indulgence and frivolity succumbs to
consumption in the presence of the handsome, young Armand Duval (Robert
Taylor). The prolonged scene commences with the confinement of the
dying Marguerite on her bed. Her weakened, wan face is framed by her
pillow - she rallies to get out of bed when she learns her lover has
come. The vulnerable woman gets out of bed and painfully makes her
way to a chair. There, her nurse brings her camellias to pin to her
lap, and brushes her hair. Rapturous, impatient, and hoping to look
perfect, Camille begs: "I'll be beautiful
again when I'll be well again, won't I?"

In an exquisite, classic deathbed
scene, she makes a great effort to stand and greet Armand as he enters.
Her eyes and face are joyous and bright for their reunion. But in moments,
she is exhausted and debilitated - he sweeps his fragile love into
his arms as she falls. He babbles to her about his reaffirmation of
love and promises to stay with her forever - now that he understands
her love-as-renunciation. He plans for their happy future together,
beginning with a trip to the country where she can get well. She gains
sustenance and power from his ardor and support. Marguerite falters
however - she goes limp and cries that she isn't strong enough.

After
he calls for the doctor, places her in a chaise and kneels at her side,
she experiences sadness for a love that she has lost forever in the
temporal world. But she's not self-deluded - her death will release
them from an untenable relationship into a more spiritual, mystical
relationship: "Perhaps it's better if I live in your
heart, where the world can't see me. If I'm dead, there'll be no staying
of our love." She signals death when her eyes burst open once. She crumbles
and falls lifeless, but remains tranquil with a gentle smile on her face.
Armand looks at her and notices she has already passed away. He is horrified
that this is the end. He buries his face on her breast, weeping. The film
ends with a final fade-out, close-up shot of Marguerite's lovely, radiant
face - imperishable in death.

At the conclusion of this film, after bidding her departing
husband Dr. Steele (George Brent) goodbye, and also comforting her sorrowful
best friend Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald), a dying Judith (Bette Davis) enters
her house - and at the foot of the stairs, she tells her maid Martha (Virginia
Brissac): "I'm going up to lie down now." Feeling her way along, she starts
climbing the stairs - one last time - she stops midway to embrace and
say goodbye to her two dogs Daffy and Don. She haltingly climbs further
toward her bedroom, kneels and offers a final prayer by her bedside.

Martha
has followed her and pulled the blind on the window, shutting out the
rays of sunlight. Judith asks: "Is that you, Martha?" She eases herself
onto her bed and lies down, telling her housekeeper to be dismissed, without
hysterics: "I don't want to be disturbed." Martha
covers her with a comforter and then respectfully leaves the room and
closes the door. Judith triumphantly and victoriously faces the end alone
and dies in a dignified manner.

A camera frames a close-up of Judith's
sightless, staring face and then slowly blurs out-of-focus, signifying
the end of her vision - and death. A heavenly chorus of voices accompanies
her entrance into the void.

Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) runs up and sneaks into
Cathy's (Merle Oberon) bedroom, where together they share one of the most
memorable, luminous deathbed scenes ever filmed. They pledge their enduring,
undying love and become reconciled after so many years of mutual unhappiness
and bitterness. They passionately hug and kiss each other, finally revealing
their truest emotions to each other:

Cathy: "Oh, Heathcliff. Oh how strong you look. How
many years do you mean to live after I'm gone? Don't, don't let
me go. If I could only hold you until we were both dead. Will you
forget me when I'm in the earth?"
Heathcliff: "I could as soon forget you with my own life, Cathy, if you
die."
Cathy: "Boy, Heathcliff. Come. Let me feel how strong you are."
Heathcliff: "Strong enough to bring us both back to life, Cathy, if you
want to live."
Cathy: "No, Heathcliff, I want to die."
Heathcliff: "Oh Cathy, why did you kill yourself?"
Cathy: vHold me. Just hold me."
Heathcliff: "Oh, and love comfort you. My tears don't love you, Cathy.
They blight and curse and damn you!"
Cathy: "Heathcliff, don't break my heart."
Heathcliff: "Oh Cathy, I never broke your heart. You broke it! Cathy!
Cathy! You loved me! What right to throw love away for the poor fancy
thing you felt for him, for a handful of worthiness. Misery and death
and all the evils that God and man could have ever done would never
have parted us. You'd be better alone. You wandered off like a wanton,
greedy child to break your heart and mine."
Cathy: "Heathcliff, forgive me. We've so little time."

Heathcliff vows to stay with Cathy as her strength ebbs.
He hears her claim that he was always the only man she ever loved.
She asks that Heathcliff pick her up: "Take me to the window.
Let me look at the moors with you once more, my darling. Once more."

Heathcliff
carries her in his arms to the window, where they look out on the
moors and the Crag where they played together as children. Before
slumping into his arms after breathing her last breath, they make
a pact to be together for eternity. She promises to wait for him there
in death until they are reunited again one day: "Heathcliff,
can you see the Crag over there where our castle is? I'll wait for
you 'til you come."

One of the most famous and popular films of all time
is director Victor Fleming's Civil War epic. Against the sweeping, panoramic
drama of the war is the passionate, tumultuous story of Scarlett O'Hara
(Vivien Leigh) and the dashing, charming Charlestonian Rhett Butler
(Clark Gable).

She is forewarned about him when he is first noticed
as the "nasty dark one" with a "most terrible reputation" standing alone
at the foot of the staircase during the Wilkes barbecue at the Twelve
Oaks plantation. Dressed in an elegant black suit, Butler exchanges
a cool, challenging stare with Scarlett. She notices him undressing
her with his eyes: "He looks as if - as if he knows what I look like
without my shimmy."

Another powerful scene during the war evokes irrevocable
feelings: Scarlett races to the enormous open-air 'hospital' of Atlanta's
railroad depot to find Dr. Meade to assist in Melanie's (Olivia de Havilland)
delivery. A close-up of Scarlett's face shows her horrified reaction to
what she sees. She picks her way through thousands of wounded and dead
Confederate soldiers strewn around the railroad depot, in one of the classic,
most incredible and memorable scenes ever filmed. In the spectacular moving
crane shot, the camera slowly pulls back to show more and more of the
defeated and crippled army in the hot sun. It finally comes to rest on
a close-up of a torn and tattered Confederate flag which waves defiantly
and bravely over the remnants of the army, a vivid representation of the
death throes of the Old South.

[And lastly, the scene of Rhett Butler's
exasperated parting from Scarlett at their front door. Scarlett asks:
"Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?" Without sentimentality,
(in a daring, almost-disallowed taboo line), he cooly responds for the
last time: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"]

# 29. Gunga Din (1939)

The greatest rousing adventure tale and film of all-time
is George Stevens' classic, based upon Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same
name - a tribute to a courageous water carrier (Sam Jaffe) who accompanies
British Army veterans in India as they battle against a fanatical, murderous
Indian cult in the late nineteenth century. In the film's stirring and
poignant ending, Gunga Din - who longs to be a regimental bugler, but
has been mortally wounded by a bayonet, gathers all his courage and strength
and crawls painfully to the top of a domed tower. There, with his last
ounce of stamina, he blows a warning from a bugle to warn approaching
British troops that they are about to be ambushed at the entrance to a
rocky pass.

As he finishes giving his warning, a bullet hits him,
and he slumps - the final sounds from his bugle are ones of his fading
death before he expires and falls from the tower. In the epilogue,
the loyal, lowly water-boy is praised and admired by a colonel for
his deserved heroism as one of the "honored dead," and he is posthumously appointed as a regimental
corporal. The last stanza of Kipling's poem is read as tribute: "...Though
I belted you and flayed you, By the living Gawd that's made you, You're
a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"

The film ends with a superimposed
image of a proudly smiling and saluting Gunga Din, fully costumed in
a British soldier's uniform.

The classic filibuster scene at the conclusion of Frank
Capra's film has to rank as one of the most-finely acted sequences ever
recorded.

After almost twenty-four hours of filibustering, with
an agonizingly, pathetically hoarse voice but also with an indomitable
spirit, a weary, pleading Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) has a few
more exhortations for the Senators who have returned to the Senate
chamber. In an extraordinary metaphor emphasizing the Capitol Dome
high above him, Smith imaginatively suggests re-positioning the lady
of the Dome back to an ethical center where she belongs: "And it's not too late. Because this country is bigger
than the Taylors or you or me or anything else. Great principles don't
get lost once they come to light. They're right here. You just have to
see them again."

When baskets, wire barrels, and bundles of stacks of
50,000 "Taylor-made" phony telegrams from Senator Paine's (Claude Rains)
state are brought in and deposited in the front of the Senate chamber,
Paine holds up a fistful, telling Smith that they all demand that he yield
the floor and give up his filibuster.

In one of the most powerful scenes
ever filmed, Jefferson staggers forward in disbelief to look at the telegrams,
pawing through them and desperately looking for some evidence of support.
In a symbolic crucifixion stance, he grabs two large fistfuls and holds
them out. In a hoarse voice, he turns toward Senator Paine and delivers
an impassioned speech, accusing Paine face-to-face of betraying his
ideals. Then with heart-stirring courage, Smith finishes his heroic
speech with the immortal eloquent words: "You think I'm licked. You all think I'm
licked. Well, I'm not licked, and I'm gonna stay right here and fight
for this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies like these,
and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody'll
listen to me. Some..."

Smith faints and collapses on the floor, dumping
a basket of telegrams over onto himself. His supportive friend Saunders
(Jean Arthur) screams from the gallery. With a strained look on his
face, Senator Paine rushes from the Senate floor toward the vestibule/cloakroom
as Smith is treated. Two or three shots ring out, and Paine is seen
struggling with other Senators. They prevent him from killing himself,
as he screams in a public confession that he is unable to live with
his guilt-ridden conscience any longer: "I'm not fit to be a Senator. I'm not fit to live.
Expel me! Expel me! Not him."

Conscience-stricken and in a fit of remorse,
Senator Paine re-enters the Senate floor and admits that everything Smith
said was true, exonerating him and the American political system.

In director John Ford's first modern Western, John Wayne
began his fertile acting partnership with the director (in his first major
western role) with the inspired, legendary scene of his first appearance
- in a role that made him famous and launched him as the most durable
Western hero.

As Ringo Kid, an outlaw who is seeking revenge for the
murder of his father and brother by the Plummers, he is first seen
'holding up' the stagecoach (with an assortment of characters) on its
way to Lordsburg. Along the way after rounding a turn, a rifle shot
is heard, and a tracking shot zooms in (losing focus for a moment)
for a large clear closeup of Ringo Kid standing tall from the perspective
of the moving stagecoach. The camera rapidly tracks in on his face.
Ringo is twirling and re-cocking his Winchester rifle in one hand,
shouting out: "Hold it!", while holding
his saddle in the other hand. He is standing in the middle of the desert
by the trail, stranded without a horse. Ringo is wearing a paneled, placket-front
shirt with a neckerchief, and jeans with its pants legs rolled up outside
of the boots.

[The stirring chase across the salt flats at the film's
conclusion, with dare-devil stunts performed atop charging horses,
is equally momentous.]

In the much-beloved film is the indelible image of Dorothy
(Judy Garland), her dog Toto, the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) who needs a brain,
the Tin Woodsman (Jack Haley) who desires a heart, and the Cowardly Lion
(Bert Lahr) who desperately wants courage. They break into spirited song
as they link arms and dance through the woods singing: "We're Off to See
the Wizard" - this single film sequence has been irrevokably imprinted
on everyone's consciousness.

With the Wicked Witch of the East's ruby
slippers on her feet, Dorothy is off to seek advice on the best way home
from the all-powerful Oz, the ruler of the Emerald City. Meanwhile,
the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) gazes into her crystal
ball high up in her broken down castle to follow their progress. With
the captain of her evil crew of wicked monkeys at her side, she cackles
gleefully. She concocts sorcery and other menacing elements to take
possession of the ruby slippers. Her plan is to cause sleep-inducing
flowers in a poppy field to poison them: "Now my beauties. Something with poison in it I
think. With poison. But attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell.
Poppies. Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Sleep. Now they'll sleep."

[Other scenes qualify as tie-breakers: Dorothy's singing
of her beloved, haunting and plaintive, but immortal song "Over the Rainbow." Dreaming,
yearning and wistfully longing for a trouble-free, fascinating, far-away
world beyond her home-land, she strolls from a bale of hay (which she
leans on), to an old wheel (which she pulls on), to a discarded buggy
(which she and Toto sit on) as she sings. Or the Wicked Witch's memorable
death scene, as she is reduced to a puddle of vaporous clothing in front
of everyone, crying out: "You cursed brat. Look what you've done. I'm
melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought
a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness." Unforgettable.]

A collection of the 100 most famous, unforgettable or
memorable images, scenes, sequences or performances in films of the
20th century.